Why Can’t I Transfer Text Messages From Android to IOS Easily?
I can’t remember the last time I switched between Android and iOS as my daily driver – the phone I use for all my personal stuff, not just the phone (s) I use for various Lifehacker-related things. And while technology has come a long way, my guess is that porting all the contents of one phone to another based on a competing platform is still a nightmare.
Unfortunately, Lifehacker reader Liseets is experiencing this joy first hand, and I’m worried that I might give her a little piece of advice that will really solve her problem: how to transfer messages from her Android to iOS. As she told Tech 911 :
“Some of us use messaging almost like a database. I have a team of employees who have been sending screenshots and photo messages (mms) every day for years. I usually don’t email them or save text / photos to phone files / backup cards. Apple sales have promised that their Move to iOS app will be able to handle MMS transfers from Android 4.0 or higher to iPhone.
After a few weeks, they are still working on “bugs” in the application that remove my attachments from messages and dump them into a spontaneously generated stream (from me to me) containing only images without any indication of who sent them and when … It’s like a shoebox of photographs in your grandmother’s closet. They insisted that I go to the COVID world to an authorized dealer to upgrade my Android operating system from 6.0 to 8.0, saying it was a problem and they couldn’t do anything until my system was updated. Then they ran the log and found an “error in the application.” They said it would take them a few days to fix it and they would come back to me.
Last week I started getting messages that they are trying to contact me – hopefully because they fixed a bug. But the links never work, and I waited for hours for the top tier to tell me if the engineers fixed it by the “down tier.” Should I try the translation again? “
Moving messages is harder than you think
As mentioned, I haven’t done this … for too long. And since I use my iPhone for everyday communication, the step-by-step guide on how to transfer messages on Android won’t help me. (After all, you are going the opposite way.)
My best advice is going to sound a little cliché, so let me start with that before we get to some of the solutions you might not particularly like. Before doing anything related to data transfer, make sure that you are using the most recent version of the operating system and applications on your iPhone and Android . There is no guarantee that you will be able to transfer your messages anyway, but using the latest OS will give you the best chance of transferring your messages from one platform to another.
Also, I’m assuming you’ve followed Apple’s advice and checked out its easy-to-understand website for migrating from Android to iOS. Pay special attention to the Switch to iOS app , which can help you, but is not always as useful as its name suggests. I’ve read a lot of reports from people who have argued that this seemingly simple application just doesn’t work – or it works forever, even if it does.
If you’re out of luck, your carrier may have an app you can try. Each of the big three – AT&T , Verizon and T-Mobile – should offer their own free data app. Again, there is no guarantee that any of these will work perfectly in your situation, but I’ve seen people do better with one of them. than migrating to iOS.
Maybe quitting smoking is good?
I think the best thing to do is to leave the ship. This does not mean that you have to get rid of the extensive text history on your Android device. Instead, take an application like SMS Backup & Restore and use it to export messages to an XML file , which you can then convert to a more readable HTML file. (There are other apps that can do all of this in one go, but I haven’t tested them.)
You can then upload that file and any attachments to your cloud storage. Feel free to view this file on your new iPhone if you ever have to go back to what you said in the previous text.
Is this the perfect solution? No, absolutely not. In an ideal world, it would be incredibly easy to migrate your messages to a new platform. Although, do you really want it? Let’s say someone gets their hands on your device or login for this mythical cross-platform cloud messaging service. Do you really want them to have a quick way to completely export your entire messaging history to another platform? Probably no. If all of your messages were connected via the cloud and easy to export / import back and forth to other platforms, I suspect the hacking possibilities could be much more frustrating.
This kind of co-installation will also require good play from Google and Apple, and I doubt any of them are keenly interested in providing an easy way to get your messages from their platform to that of a competitor.
So unfortunately you are a bit stuck. If these simpler solutions don’t work for you, then I’m not going to stream your Android messages to iOS – if at all possible. To be honest, I think the “backup and check as needed” method is the best way. I used to be very worried about saving my phone messages when navigating different Android phones until I finally realized that I rarely – if ever – look up old text messages.
Treat text messages like ephemeral notifications and take your conversations that need to be saved to another platform that is accessible to everyone and keeps a long enough history. It’s probably not something like Slack (unless you have a corporate account with great retention policies), but can be as simple as a shared folder / note / photo album. Or, besides that, a cloud document that anyone can access and update.
While it’s a shame that you can’t transfer old messages to your new iPhone, this step gives you an opportunity to rethink the way you and your coworkers communicate. And if it helps you find a better, future-proof and platform-independent solution, well, losing some messages might be worth it.